Stefanie Olsen at News Blog has this new finding about environmental concerns in the online teen community:
Teens who are most active online and influential with peers are also the kids most concerned about the environment, according to a study published Monday by research firm JupiterResearch. ... Green teens are more apt to listen to music, post a personal page online, respond to an online poll or converse in a chat room, according to the report.
Edward Champion's recent LA Times article "Blogging: a crash course on introspection" is probably the most muddled commentary on blogging I've encountered in the past year.
His thesis is that "confessional" writing has been "spurred by cyberspace," with narcissistic bloggers baring their most intimate secrets with shameless abandon, pandering to "our voyeuristic culture." Champion wonders "why so many writers want (or need) to expose themselves."
The number of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations Champion manages to compress into the opening paragraphs of the article is truly dazzling. If only he'd taken the time to consult an undergraduate-level textbook on modern literature, he might have also gotten some of his terminology right.
The "confessional" writers were a movement of poets (primarily) who in the 1950s and 1960s began treating an autobiographical "I" as the primary subject of the work, delving with stark frankness into emotional and sexual experiences in a way that violated previous taboos about what constituted proper poetic material.
Champion conflates confessional material with introspection, though they are not the same thing at all. T.S. Eliot, for example, was a deeply introspective poet, but he avoided personal revelations in his own work. I've heard it argued that Anne Sexton, one of the leading confessional poets, was herself not terribly introspective.
The article also seems to equate "confessional" with "narcissistic" and (though Champion doesn't use the word himself) "exhibitionist." However, the "I" of the confessional poets was, more often than not, something other than the "real" I, an invented self or persona that enabled the writer to explore a wider range of themes than his or her personal experience permitted.
What this article contends this all has to do with blogging remains a mystery. Supposedly, writers like Ginsberg and Plath and Lowell are off in the afterlife kicking themselves for having died before the Internet came along and gave them limitless opportunity to indulge in their narcissism and expose themselves to an online audience. Supposedly, a new generation of confessional writers has emerged, again "spurred by cyberspace."
If that is indeed the point of the piece, Champion selects an odd assortment of writers to prove it. His examples -- Amy DeZella, Jane Ganahl, Jonathan Ames, Josh Kornbluth and others -- are professional journalists and performers who were already working with personal materials publicly, before moving to the Internet. In their interviews, they all seem fairly discontent with their online experiences, probably because their presentational styles are better suited to print or stage than to the blogosphere.
If there really were a new confessional school of writing in the process of emerging online, I'd be interested. But Champion hasn't found one.
At Salon today, Gary Kamiya writes in praise of old-fashioned editing and editors, and naturally touches on the blogosphere:
In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped. Its main function is to communicate clearly. It isn't intended to last.
Still, he says, the better writers will be the ones who ultimately prevail in the electronic age, as quality rises above the glut of competing voices. Success will be awarded either to the highly talented writer, or to the writer who collaborates with a highly talented editor.
Kamiya's piece reminded me of a tribute to another of my heroes, the rebel journalist I.F. Stone, that Dan Froomkin posted back on July 9.
"The best blogger ever," Froomkin wrote, "died in 1989 at the age of 81." The I.F. Stone Weekly, which ran from 1953 to 1971, was essentially a paper blog. Stone's newsletter was composed as a miscellany of short articles, opinions and commentary on material written by other journalists, like today's blog.
The newsletter's other blog-like quality was that it was unapologetically opinionated and passionate, "a far cry from the passionless prose that afflicts so much mainstream political reporting."
Like so many of today's top bloggers, Stone built a community of loyal readers around his voice — an informed voice, full of outrage and born of an unconcealed devotion to decency and fair play, civil liberty, free speech, peace in the world, truth in government, and a humane society.
Froomkin criticizes the feeble attempts at blogging so many newspapers have launched, which he complains are written "in monotone." Stone's informal, impassioned, energetic style is what the print-reporter-turned-blogger ought to be emulating.
As Kamiya contends, editors have a significant role to play in the future of online media. But both writers and editors need to be attuned to the way that blogging involves a different approach to voice from the newspaper column.
Novelist Richard Ford has never read a literary blog, but he's ready to critique them anyway.
In a May 2 New York Times story about the decline of the book review in papers across the nation, Ford remarks that "“Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership, in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”
While I'm reluctant to second-guess one of our greatest living authors (and a fellow Mississippian, as well), such high-brow stereotyping of the blogger lacks understanding and gratitude for the contributions the blogosphere has made to the book industry, and to individual authors such as Mr. Ford.
The crisis of the newspaper book review was a topic of conversation on yesterday's Talk of the Nation, when John Freeman of the National Book Critics Circle was a guest. Economics are at the root of the problem, with publishers struggling to cut costs in the face of market uncertainties, in part brought on by Internet competition. Seemingly no one views this as a welcome development, and no one with an ounce of sense is about to claim that the blog can replace the traditional book review.
But book bloggers are a major force for good for the publishing industry, and for authors. Motoko Rich of the Times mentions the case of the short story collection This Is Not Chick Lit, which was largely overlooked by print reviewers but received a great deal of support and attention in the blogosphere. The result? The book "is now in its sixth printing with 45,000 copies in print."
I hope that Mr. Ford, a man of great sagacity, will reconsider and sample at least a few of the book blogs where 'guys sitting in their basements' have been promoting his work for years. I myself stand second to no one in my love of the old-fashioned book review, and I hope for its rescue.
However, if it goes the way of extinction, the blame will fall on the newspaper publishers who have abdicated their responsibility to the literary community -- a responsibility that the literary bloggers seem happy to assume.
I've been following the debate this week over Tim O'Reilly's call for civility in the blogosphere and his suggestions for a code of conduct governing what kinds of behavior will or won't be permitted on individual sites. Included in the program is the elimination of anonymous posts.
Online response has been, overwhelmingly, negative. So I find myself on the minority side of an issue -- certainly not for the first time in my life. I fundamentally agree with O'Reilly and with Tony Long's tongue-in-cheek challenge on Wired to anonymous posters:
If you're going to fire a rocket at someone in a blog post, or anywhere else, at least have the class to use your real name and stand behind your vitriol. Anything less makes you a coward and invalidates whatever bile you've spewed. My name is on this, and I'm calling you gutless if you don't sign yours. What are you going to do about it, blogger boy?
The arguments in defense of anonymous posts, which I admit have some merit, include contentions that anonymity encourages more people to join an open discussion, and that it minimizes the ego battles that interfere with fair debate when the identities of the parties are known.
But I suspect that something more fundamental is at stake here than online manners, or even morality. This is an issue about the fundamental character of the medium, whether it will be Apollonian or Dionysian.
The O'Reilly camp upholds Apollonian ideals of order and reason in the quest for idealized truth. Apollo was the god of cognition, individuation and civilization, core qualities of Western culture. In addition, he was the symbol of "ethical" conduct, in the root sense of that word: the idea that what was permitted to and what was expected of the individual was a product of his or her public character. In the Apollonian view, civic order depends on everyone possessing a known and fixed identity. Anonymity or the possibility of shifting identities leads to chaos.
Dionysos is thought of today as the god of wine, but that's simply a shorthand notation for his true significance, which was the power of intoxication in various forms. Intoxication destabilizes fixed identity, leading to a merging with the "other" and a widening of possible experiences. He was also patron of the Greek theater, where actors publicly presented themselves as characters who they weren't. The Dionysian experience is tribal, mythic and communal. It was, in addition, "ecstatic" (again, in the root meaning of the word). Ecstasy is the state of "standing outside" the self, of temporarily setting aside the burden of your quotidian identity, liberating you from yourself.
If this past week's response to O'Reilly's code of conduct is a reliable indication, it appears the blogosphere has a strong Dionysian current that will resist ethical reform -- not because bloggers support hate speech, but because those ecstatic possibilities are a key feature of the medium.
